Why should I not be allowed to use my freedom of speech to ask a company to not do business with someone doing something nasty?
Why should that business not be allowed to use their freedom of association to not do business with those folks?
Why is legal action the only acceptable approach to bad actions? Direct action, pressure, and boycots have worked well against injustices in the past; see sit-ins in the American south during the civil rights era as an example.
I don't believe in "freedom of association" for monopolies and oligopolies, it's an end-run around our rights by another means. And "freedom of association" was also the excuse given by businesses to not serve black people in the South in the first place.
Organizing through market pressure only works if you're already rich, it's just another concentration of power at the top in what's already a very unequal country. No one is going to pressure or boycott facebook off the internet.
> And "freedom of association" was also the excuse given by businesses to not serve black people in the South in the first place.
Sure, freedom of association goes both ways. We decided as a society to add protections for minority groups to prevent that sort of specific abuse. I don't think we'll do the same for Kiwifarms, and I'd argue that's the correct call.
I don't believe abuses are okay if you have more market power, and I don't believe they will stop with Kiwifarms, which was not the first victim of this phenomenon.
I was active on an anarchist forum that died because Cloudflare pulled the plug on 8chan, which hosted said forum. You may want a world where a few companies decide what you can and can't say; I don't think I can afford to live in one.
'Just go to the state monopoly instead and hope they're responsive' is a poor strategy. As is well established in law, cops and prosecutors aren't obliged to protect yu even though they have vast legal immunity of their own.
